Edgar Hunt (1876-1955). In the Farmyard. 1924. Oil on canvas.

First off: I'm so sorry on the length, but I am incapable of doing anything half-assed, and that apparently includes this.

Second off: big-ass animal abuse warning, animal negligence warning, gore warning, pet hoarding warning.. there’s a lot going on, so if animals in distress bothers you, be careful reading this. If graphic pictures of animals hurt bothers you, then be leery of clicking links in the doc itself - I have tried to put warnings on every instance of gore, but Dani takes a lot of pictures of her animals when they are sick, injured, or she’s autopsying them.

With that said:

This is a 107 page document on why, going through the Ramsey Lofts' history, I don't think they should be running a loft, or even owning birds. They have a history of behaviour, since 2015, that has repeatedly led to massive deaths within their birds, and they have had poor husbandry for their birds for almost the entire time they have been posting on tumblr. It has never really changed, despite their reoccurring cycle where their number of birds swell, overwhelms them, and results in disaster. This cycle has been going on since 2017, at the very least.

There is a Table of Contents to the doc for easy reading, but I don't expect people to read this entire document! It's mostly for my peace of mind, and so that I can just give this to people, when they drag this shit to my doorstep once more. If data is more your thing, a friend made a spreadsheet listing the majority of the lofts’ birds, with parentage, injuries, and deaths for peoples’ references. CW for a lot of injury and death.

I know some people feel the Ramsey Loft has taken a great deal of backlash at this point, and this may seem unnecessary. But Dani is not new to pigeons. She has been actively working with pigeons since at least 2015, and she has been breeding doves since 2011. It isn't that she doesn't know how to care properly for her birds: it is that she is choosing not to. I have gotten a number of people asking me what of her practices I find distasteful. The answer is all of them, and this google docs is my solution to not having to keep explaining it.

Like I said, I don’t expect people to necessarily read this, or even read all of it. So here is a cliffnotes of just some of the reasons I do not think she should have pigeons.

First off: her coop is entirely too small, and inadequately made, for the amount of birds that she has. I wrote an extensive post about that, so that’ll stay covered there, mostly, with the unhappy edition of:

That’s poor hygiene at best, but it’s not unexpected: below, you’ll see she has pest issues within her coop, but she also chooses to autopsy her birds inside of her house. (HUGE CONTENT WARNING ON THIS LINK FOR PICTURES OF AN AUTOPSY, BLOW BY BLOW) She does not wear gloves doing this, and another autopsy featured her dissecting a bird full of worms.

Dani is careless with her animal’s safety, when it comes to other animals. Dani has allowed her pigeons to interact with rats, resulting in a bird losing a nail to the rats trying to eat him alive, and she has allowed her pigeons to interact with doves, leading to a squab getting disembowled. (This picture is text, with no picture, because she posted a picture of the squab’s guts literally hanging out of it: actual link is in the doc. Similarly: all text, no pic on the following.) One of her pigeons disemboweled and ate two of her squabs alive - and if you note the dates, she says in this screenshot she still has the rats, a month after they attacked a bird.

 But in pretty much all instances, she is negligent towards her birds safety when it comes to their environment and herself as well. She has knelt on one of her squabs, crushing his skull. She sat on another squab, breaking his leg. She allowed a layman (not a veterinarian) to liveblog a surgery on an unaesthesized bird, including pictures, in her server, and refused to take it down. (HUGE CONTENT WARNING OF GORE / EVERYTHING ON THAT LINK.) On her aviary's porch, she has her feedbags positioned so that three separate birds have gotten trapped in them. The first, Nobu, was found. The second, Riddle, was found. The third time was not the charm: Jojo went missing for three fucking months, and it would turn out that he had gotten trapped behind the feedbags, died, and was rotting, covered in maggots, by the time she found him. This was not the only instance of maggots in her coop: when a bag of food ripped outside of the loft, she left it on the ground to the point that it sprouted, rotted, and became a festering mass of maggots right next to her birds.

Maggots are not the only pests that she has had a reoccuring issue with. Her coop has roaches, moths that infest her pigeon feed, and grain weevils. This might be less noteworthy, if the pigeons didn’t eat off of the floor of her coop, rather than the more traditional fucking feeders or bowls. (Noteworthy here is that she admits her birds have on occasion scavenged from the sand that they shit in, which is A+ on spreading disease in your coop.)  Roaches can carry salmonella, and grain beetles can carry tapeworms, both reoccuring issues that her birds face, but she does not put down pesticides, increase her cleaning, or even just put down diatomaceous earth - she says she crushes the roaches instead when she sees them, even though one climbs out of her nest box in that video.

In the past, Dani has owned and bred other species of animals. With the doves, the last species she owned, she had three separate salmonella outbreaks in the course of a year, resulting in every single dove dying except for one.  Her pigeon coop has faced at least two separate incidents of ammonia poisoning, and many more incidences of more minor diseases. Right now, she’s dealing with asper in her flock. One would think this would increase her focus on hygiene in her coop, but Dani is having to deworm her (non-free flying, stay in the coop or in controlled areas) birds every other month, because one literally died of how many worms were infesting its organs, and that is more than I’ve heard even keepers in tropical regions who free-fly their pigeons having to deworm.

Again, if any of this makes you want more context or sourced links, the document has a table of contents for easy reference. The document has everything mentioned above, and unfortunately, way more.

“It’s Been One Bitchtastic Week” 3/16/2018 with progress gif

Types of British Animals. Written by Frederick G. Aflalo. Illustrated by Edmund Caldwell. 1909.

Drawing Birds. Written and illustrated by Maurice Wilson. Published in 1965.

Wildlife in North Carolina. March 1977. Illustration by Bob Hines.

Wildlife in North Carolina. September 1972. Illustration by Duane Raver Jr.